Marking the Boundaries

When you use a source in your paper, it is important to help readers distinguish between your ideas and prose and your sources’ ideas and prose. We call this “marking the boundaries” between you and your sources.

Direct quotation

When you use a direct quotation from a source, readers can easily see where your prose ends and your source’s prose begins, because you use quotation marks (or, with long quotations, indentation) to identify the source’s prose.

Janssen and Carradini (2021) reported that “there was growing concern [among Generation Z employees] about the expectation of being available professionally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” (p. 150). It appears that even young employees want some compartmentalization between work and personal life. 

Summary and paraphrase

When you summarize or paraphrase a source’s ideas, you can use a variety of techniques for showing where the source author’s ideas begin and end.

Signal phrase + parenthetical citation

The signal phrase (in boldface in the example below) indicates the beginning of the source material, and the parenthetical (also in boldface) indicates the end.

Many students are aware that academic writing has unwritten rules they aren’t familiar with. The students interviewed in Denny et al.’s (2018) study wanted help understanding the unspoken conventions and purposes of college writing (p. 78). Undergraduates are not the only students to sense that academic writing has hidden rules: graduate students working on their dissertations also express uncertainty about the rules of disciplinary writing. In a 2016 study by….

Parenthetical citation without a signal phrase

Sometimes, you may prefer not to use a signal phrase, as when you want to emphasize the idea over the source of the idea. Research writing in the social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines may use fewer signal phrases. This example relies on parenthetical citations (in boldface) to indicate which sentences are sourced:

Successive governments [in the UK] have encouraged people to save, invest in pensions and aspire to homeownership, which has had a significant impact on how people view assets (Lowe et al., 2012). Despite homeownership being one of the most common forms of asset in the UK, assets are unevenly distributed (ONS, 2009; Appleyard and Rowlingson, 2010, 2011). To address this, the former UK Labour government introduced a series of asset-based welfare schemes designed to promote asset accumulation amongst low income households. However, the changing political and economic landscape in the UK has led to some schemes being cancelled (for example, the Child Trust Fund and Saving Gateway) which effectively ends most of UK asset-based welfare for the poor, whilst ISAs, for the better-off, continue and savings limits have been increased to £10,200 per annum tax free. Despite the best intentions of policymakers to encourage asset ownership, the distribution of assets remains highly unequal (Hills, 2010). As such, social policy literature has closely followed the rolling back of the frontiers of the state and the implications for individuals and households and continues to do so.

The writer of this passage wants to put the emphasis on the facts and ideas they are narrating rather than on the sources of those facts and ideas. If a sentence is followed by a parenthetical citation, we know the facts or ideas in that sentence come from the source in that parenthetical. If a sentence is not followed by a parenthetical citation, the facts or ideas in the sentence come from the writer (or are common knowledge).

What should you do when two or more successive paraphrased sentences come from the same source?  

You have a few options when two or more successive sentences in your paper come from the same source:

You can use a signal phrase in the first sentence and use subsequent signal phrases to indicate that the source material is continuing, as in this example: 

Students interviewed by Denny et al. (2018) said they visited the writing center to learn about the basics of college writing (p. 78). The researchers noted, however, that traditional writing center approaches, which involve drawing out the writer’s existing knowledge, do not serve such students well.

A word about page number citations: In the example above, the first sentence provides a signal phrase and a page number citation, since the information it paraphrases appears on a specific page in the source article. The second sentence does not provide a page number, since that is the main point of the article, and it appears in several places there.

If you repeat the author names after the first signal phrase, the year of the work, if it required by your manual style, can often be omitted. 

You can use parenthetical citations at the end of each sentence:

If you prefer not to use signal phrases, you can use parenthetical citations at the end of each sentence that paraphrases the source: 

Many students who visit the writing center want to learn about the basic rules and conventions of college writing (Denny et al., 2018, p. 78). Yet, traditional writing center approaches, which involve drawing out the writer’s existing knowledge, do not serve such students well (Denny et al., 2018). 

This can feel clunky, however. You can avoid using repeat parentheticals at the end of each sentence if you make it clear, in your own writing, that you are still talking about the source, as in this example:  

Many students who visit the writing center want to learn about the basic rules and conventions of college writing (Denny et al., 2018, p. 78). The same study proposes that traditional writing center approaches, which involve drawing out the writer’s existing knowledge, do not serve such students well. 

What you cannot do: Insert a parenthetical at the end of the first or final sentence only, and hope readers will understand that the source material extends several sentences beyond, as in this erroneous example: 

X   Many students who visit the writing center want to learn about the basic rules and conventions of college writing. Yet writing traditional writing center approaches, which involve drawing out the writer’s existing knowledge, do not serve such students well (Denny et al., 2018).

In the example above, the first sentence, which also comes from the Denny et al. source, needs to have its own in-text citation (signal phrase and/or parenthetical). In the absence of clarifying language, the parenthetical citation at the end of a sentence applies only to the single paraphrased sentence it follows. 

Nor can you insert a parenthetical at the end of the first sentence only, and hope readers will understand that the source material extends beyond it, if you have not indicated that in your writing: 

X   Many students who visit the writing center want to learn about the basic rules and conventions of college writing (Denny et al., 2018). Yet writing traditional writing center approaches, which involve drawing out the writer’s existing knowledge, do not serve such students well. 

If you want to limit your use of parenthetical citations, you must indicate, in your own writing, that the summary or paraphrase extends beyond the citation.  

Updated August 2024